Series:

The study provides a close analysis of literary works by women in late-18
th
- and early-19
th
-century Russia, with a focus on Anna Naumova, Mariia Pospelova, and Mariia Bolotnikova. Political, social and feminist theories are applied to examine restrictions imposed on women. Women authors in particular were fettered by a culture of feminisation strongly influenced by the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. As Sentimentalism and its aesthetics began to give way to Romantic ideals, some provincial Russian women writers saw an opportunity to claim social equality, and to challenge traditional concepts of authorship and a view of women as mute and passive.

Bernstein, Lina: ‘Women on the Verge of a New Language. Russian Salon Hostesses in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century’. In: Goscilo, Helena / Holmgren, Beth (eds): Russia—Women—Culture. Indiana University Press: Bloomington 1996, pp. 209–224

Bersier, Gabrielle: ‘Arcadia Revitalized. The International Appeal of Gessner’s Idylls in the 18th Century. In: Grimm, Reinhold / Hermand, Jost (eds): From the Greeks to the Greens. Images of the Simple Life. University of Wisconsin Press: Madison 1989, pp. 34–47

Ewington, Amanda (ed. and transl.): Russian Women Poets of the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries. Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies at the University of Toronto: Toronto 2014

Faggionato, Raffaela: ‘From a Society of the Enlightened to the Enlightenment of Society. The Russian Bible Society and Freemasonry in the Age of Alexander I’. In: Study Group on Eighteenth-Century Russia. Newsletter 27, 1999, pp. 8–11

Kisljagina, L.: ‘The Question of the Development of N. M. Karamzin’s Social Political Views in the Nineties of the Eighteenth Century. N. M. Karamzin and the Great French Bourgeois Revolution’. In: Black, J. (ed.): Essays on Karamzin. Russian Man-of-Letters, Political Thinker, Historian. 1766–1826. Mouton: The Hague 1975, pp. 91–104

Rosslyn, Wendy: ‘Anna Bunina’s “Unchaste Relationship with the Muses”. Patronage, the Market and the Woman Writer in Early Nineteenth-Century Russia’. The Slavonic and East European Review 74, 1996, pp. 223–242

Stohler, Ursula: ‘“I Will Create Whatever I Want To”. Naturalness as a Source of Mastery in the Works of Sentimentalist Women Poets’. In: Study Group on Eighteenth-Century Russia. Newsletter 31, 2003, pp. 24–29

Stohler, Ursula: ‘Released from Her Fetters? Natural Equality in the Work of the Russian Sentimentalist Woman Writer Mariia Bolotnikova’. Aspasia. International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European Women’s and Gender History 2, 2008, pp. 1–27